Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (23 page)

Indeed, almost all liberal behavioral tropes track the impotent rage of small children. Thus for example, there is also the popular tactic of repeating some stupid, meaningless phrase a billion times:
Arms for hostages, arms for hostages, arms for hostages, it’s just about sex, just about sex, just about sex, dumb, dumb, dumb, money in politics, money in politics, money in politics, Enron, Enron, Enron.
Nothing repeated with mind-numbing frequency in all major news outlets will not be believed by some members of the populace. It is the permanence of evil; you can’t stop it.

The power of brainwashing by repetition is powerfully illustrated in the case of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill battle. Immediately following the hearings, 69 percent of women believed Thomas rather than Hill. (A
Newsweek
reporter wrote in the liberal
New Republic
magazine that, among co-workers who knew both Thomas and Hill, the vote was: Thomas, “20-to-1.”)
¹

But over the course of the next year, Hill was endlessly praised in the mainstream media, showered with dozens of awards, and invited to speak at once-prestigious organizations, such as Yale Law School and the American Bar Association.
²
Her heroism—and Thomas’s perfidy—was flogged on TV sitcoms such as
Murphy Brown
and
Designing Women
(the latter ironically produced by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, friend of real sexual harasser Bill Clinton).
³
Hill was made
Glamour
magazine’s Woman of the Year and featured in a Ted Turner documentary,
A Century of Women
—with fair and balanced commentary by liberal Senator Barbara Boxer.
⁴
Needless to say, Hill was sympathetically stroked by Katie Couric on the
Today
show.

One year later, with no new facts, no new hearings, no new evidence— but a
lot
of media propaganda—only 44 percent of women believed Thomas over Hill. After watching the hearings, 73 percent of people said the Senate had treated Hill fairly. One year later only 49 percent thought so.
⁵

Repetition alone doesn’t win elections (and is demonstrably incapable of producing a twitch of interest in “campaign finance reform”). But constant liberal browbeating demonstrably can persuade large numbers of people that Republicans are dumb, irrespective of cold, hard facts. Also angry, mean, intolerant, inflexible, and judgmental—unlike the welcoming charm and noted flexibility of, say, Hillary Clinton.

Another infantile trope of the left is to deny the relevance of analogies and categories, so you can never trap them. No matter how apt it is, no matter how clearly it exposes the poverty of their logic, liberals always say analogies have “changed the subject”:
We were talking about Paula Jones, so I don’t know where Anita Hill came from.
Each case must be treated as if it just emerged from the ether, analyzed in a vacuum apart from any conceivable larger principle.

Liberals also refuse to acknowledge the meaning of “labels,” which are nothing more than truths liberals don’t like. They especially hate the word “liberal.” Everyone knows it’s an insult to be called a liberal, widely understood to connote a dastardly individual. Consequently, liberals are constantly insisting that the word is utterly meaningless. (In contradistinction, evidently, to phrases like “right-wing,” “ultra-conservative,” and “religious right,” which are treated as terms of near-scientific accuracy.) Indeed, the surest sign that one is dealing with a liberal is his refusal to grant meaning to the word “liberal.”

The argument that “liberal” conveys no meaningful information is always stated in terms of the great variation among liberals. There is more variation among dogs than among liberals, but that doesn’t mean the word “dog” has no meaning. No one demands a twenty-minute exegesis on the differences between a poodle and a Great Dane before acknowledging that the word “dog” has meaning. Similarly, there are tall liberals, short liberals, cowardly liberals, even more cowardly liberals—but there is still an essential dogness to all of them.

Humans could not communicate if liberal objections to labels were applied across the board—which is precisely the point. Liberals argue by creating semantic bedlam: They conceal conservative arguments like furtive children hiding contraband from Mother under the bed. Conservatives have a point of view; there’s no reason to be frightened of hearing it stated in an artful form.

The goal of modern propaganda “is no longer to transform opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief.”
⁶
The myth of the “dumb” Republican is no more rational than a cultural belief in voodoo or rain dances. It keeps not raining, but the people still believe in it. Your own cultural myths are never recognizable as such; otherwise they wouldn’t be cultural myths.

In other contexts, especially university admissions, liberals deem IQ a meaningless construct and the SAT test a racist, sadistic ploy. But the wholly subjective opinion of liberal journalists about a Republican’s IQ is treated like holy gospel. Though IQ is an ephemeral quality absolutely indiscernible to university admissions officers perusing student SAT scores, the
Washington Post
managed to locate a Harvard professor who was able to comment thoughtfully on Bush’s intelligence.
⁷
Liberals acknowledge the concept of IQ only in the cases of Republican presidential candidates and murderers on death row. (The retarded should not be executed! Nor should anyone else.)

The myth of dumb Republicans permits only one narrow exception: When not defined by their monumental stupidity, Republicans must be scarily weird. The far-less-popular scarily weird caricature has been applied, for example, to Nixon, Dole, and Gingrich.

Liberalism’s High Priests in the media provided insistent cues that Newt Gingrich was supposed to be portrayed as “mean,” not “dumb.” The “weirdo” caricature was stated most forthrightly in a
Newsweek
headline that called Gingrich “Spiro Agnew with Brains.”
⁸
It was also indicated by
Time
magazine, putting him on their cover as Scrooge. Weeks later, showing the fierce independent thought that dominates liberal discourse in America,
Newsweek
put him on their cover as the Grinch. (The idea was, welfare was Christmas, and Gingrich was trying to steal it. After the Scrooge’s welfare reform turned out to be a fabulous success, it became Clinton’s initiative, his signature reform, his good idea.)

So powerful are liberal myths, that they often lead to spiritual visions among the media elite. The apocryphal stories typically acquire the status of fact by neurotic repetition in Maureen Dowd columns. Among many other widely accepted apparitions, Attorney General John Ashcroft is absurdly said to fear calico cats and Dan Quayle was alleged to have apologized to an audience in Latin America for not studying his Latin more. (Noticeably, nobody could ever seem to produce a videotape of many famous Dan Quayle gaffes.)

The Dumb Republican/Smart Democrat myth lives in a world devoid of rational thought and logical consistency. It never occurs to anyone to ponder why the Republican Party would pursue such a crazy strategy of consistently running really dumb guys for office—much less president. Or why the Democratic Party insists on tapping presidential candidates who are so mind-bogglngly smart they can never connect with the average voter.

Yet the compulsion to describe every Republican president as an idiot has been part of the left’s re-education efforts for over half a century. Coohdge was dumb, Eisenhower was dumb, Ford was dumb, Nixon was dumb (overshadowed by his pure evil), Quayle (standing in for his boss) was dumb, Reagan was dumb, Bush (43) is dumb.

Coolidge presided over peace and prosperity, was successful with Congress, and wildly popular with the public. But he was supposed to be an idiot. In the most titanic military accomplishment since Alexander the Great, Dwight Eisenhower marshaled the greatest military alliance in history, masterminded the D-Day invasion, and smashed the Nazi war machine. Liberals go around calling people fascists—well, this is the guy who beat them. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Gerald Ford had been an All-American football player and graduated from University of Michigan and Yale Law School. Yet he was indelibly known as a clumsy dolt. He was not nearly as dumb, however, as Ronald Reagan, the bumbling old guy who won the Cold War.

George Herbert Walker Bush (41) was shielded from the “dumb” argument not by his stellar resume, but by his lightning rod vice president. (Liberals cannot fight a two-front war.) Consequently, though Bush was portrayed as a simpleton who couldn’t talk, the most vicious attacks were trained on Dan Quayle. Whatever you can say about Quayle, he’s smarter than Tom Daschle. George Bush (43), with degrees from Yale and Harvard, is ridiculed for his stupidity by Hollywood starlets whose course of study is limited to what they’ve learned from bald sweaty little men on casting couches.

Maybe some Republicans (Ford) were a little dumb, but liberals don’t even try to make distinctions. Not distinctions with a tenuous connection to reality, that is. As a rule of thumb, only Republicans dumb enough to lose to a Democrat have a shot at ever being called smart. Thus, under what classification scheme, precisely, is Bob Dole more intelligent than Ronald Reagan? Yet Dole was rarely called dumb. His candidacy was dead in the water before it began.

“Stupid” means one thing: “threatening to the interests of the Democratic Party.” The more conservative the Republican, the more vicious and hysterical the attacks on his intelligence will be. Liberals have not only run out of arguments, they’ve run out of adjectives.

Consistent with this definition of “dumb,” the current idiot Republican is always dumber than all the dumb Republicans who preceded him. Bush is dumber than Dan Quayle, who was dumber than Ronald Reagan, who was dumber than Dwight Eisenhower and Calvin Coolidge. Astonishingly, the left’s propagandistic purposes have recently demanded even Reagan’s rehabilitation in order to attack George W. Bush’s intelligence with greater vigor. This is nuance in liberal argumentation: dumb and dumber.

College dropout Michael Moore expressed the party line on relative Republican IQs, saying, “Once you settle for a Ronald Reagan, then it’s easy to settle for a George Bush, and once you settle for a George Bush, then it’s real easy to settle for Bush II. You know, this should be evolution, instead it’s de-evolution. What’s next?”
⁹

That’s easy. What’s next is a Republican even dumber than George Bush!

But if you can remember what happened the day before yesterday, it never adds up. If the last Republican was the dumbest person in the history of mankind, at some point it becomes metaphysically impossible for the next Republican to keep being even dumber. On the bright side, the constant upgrading of former Republican presidents keeps historians in business. They can always go back and produce shocking new evidence that some previous Republican president, chosen at random, was not a dimwit after all. At least it’s nice to know that all Republican presidents will eventually see their IQs skyrocket.

Historians have concluded only fairly recently, for example, that both Coolidge and Eisenhower were quite shrewd and perfectly content with the sophisticates of their days ridiculing them as idiots. This follows decades of sneering at both presidents for failing to live up to the standards of FDR, who was obviously great because he spent eight years failing to get the country out of the Depression but then had the skill and foresight to allow the nation to be taken by surprise at Pearl Harbor.

Just before the 2000 election,
Slate
columnist Robert Wright referred to the recent revisionism on Eisenhower, saying his “voluminous personal correspondence shows beyond doubt that he was vastly smarter than either Reagan or Bush.”
¹⁰
That’s an interesting formulation. The only baseline Wright acknowledges is “Reagan or Bush.” Only Republican presidents are subject to having their intellects questioned. Why not Truman and Kennedy—Eisenhower’s immediate predecessor and successor?

Truman got the country into a war in Korea, and couldn’t get us out for two and a half years. Eisenhower was elected and ended the war in six months. Kennedy got the country into a war in Vietnam after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and then sat passively by while the Russians built the Berlin Wall. So how does Eisenhower’s intelligence compare with those two guys? It’s as if comparisons with a Republican’s immediate predecessor and successor are inherently invalid because it wouldn’t be right to comment on the relative competence of a Democrat.

Remember how stupid Reagan was?
New York Times
editor Howell Raines famously pronounced that Reagan was so stupid, he couldn’t tie his shoes.
¹¹
Now get this: Quayle was even dumber! (And what were Raines’s SAT scores again?) Michael Kinsley attacked Quayle in 1988, saying he was “outdoing even Ronald Reagan’s” gaffes.
¹²
In 1992, the year of Quayle’s next run, cartoonist Matt Greening, creator of
The Simpsons,
said Quayle “is more stupid than Ronald Reagan put together.”
¹³
But then, guess who turned out to be even
dumber
than Quayle? That’s right: George W. Bush! In twenty years, he’ll be the smart one.

Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) attacked Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign—or “questioned Mr. Bush’s intelligence,” as the
New York Times
somberly put it—by calling him dumber than ... Dan Quayle. Kerry said, “All over this country people are asking whether or not George Bush is smart enough to be president of the United States.” And the “scary” thing is, “one of the people asking me was Dan Quayle.”
¹⁴